Kinship and Relatedness (Anthropology)

In Interpreting Ancient Egyptian Narratives, Martin Pehal applies structural analysis to four New Kingdom narrative compositions. The study explains the strong configurational character of ancient Egyptian (mythological) thought which has the ability to connect various ontological levels of human experience with the surrounding world into complex synchronic structures. These symbolical systems are shown to be mediating between the various cultural paradoxes which were inherent to ancient Egyptian society. Axial role in this process is attributed to the institution of positional kingship represented by the Pharaoh. Its transformative function is also put into relation to the special status of female characters who are shown to play the part of the “powerful powerless ones” further personifying the aspects of the mediating function of myth. Gradually, the study outlines a genuinely Egyptian “structural net” of basic mythemes and explains in what way it was possible for such a system to change and incorporate foreign mythological motifs especially from the Near East.

"Corruption has become one of the most popular topics in the social scientific disciplines. However, there is a lack of interdisciplinary communication about corruption. Models developed by different
academic disciplines are often isolated from each other. The purpose of this paper is to review several major approaches to corruption and draw them closer to each other. Most studies of corruption fall
into three major categories: (i) rational-actor models where corruption is viewed as resulting from cost/benefit analysis of individual actors; (ii) structural models that focus on external forces that determine corruption; and (iii) relational models that emphasize social interactions and networks among corrupt actors. Focusing on actors’ behavior and the social context, this article explains corruption concepts taken from sociology, economics, organization studies, political science, social anthropology, and social psychology."

The papers in this issue trace a particular set of Māori interventions in anthropology, arts, museums and heritage in the early twentieth century and consider their implications for iwi ‘tribal communities’, development and environmental management today. They follow Apirana Ngata, Te Rangihīroa (Peter Buck) and some of their Māori and Pākehā (European New Zealander) allies at the Polynesian Society through the Dominion Museum expeditions, on Te Poari Whakapapa (the Board of Maori Ethnological Research) and in a variety of community research initiatives. The authors explore how engagement with ancestral tikanga ‘practices’ and with western technologies and institutions allowed these scholars and leaders to imagine te ao hou ‘a new world’ in Aotearoa New Zealand. Through the analysis of surviving photographs, films, artefacts, collections and displays, as well as the extensive written archives that were produced through their efforts, the articles in this issue explore how relational concepts and practices including whakapapa ‘kin networks’ and tuku ‘exchange of treasures (taonga)’ were mobilised as practical ontologies, that is, as methods for bringing new things (artefacts, systems, concepts) into being. The lasting effects of these collaborative projects on museums, scholarship, government administration and tribal cultural heritage are investigated, showing the enduring relevance of this work in the present.

Ethnographic and historical data from many regions of the world indicate the extent to which kingship as an institution involves the creative management of both affinity and consanguinity. Royal ideologies often depict the king as an affinal relative of his people, but at the same time he is also a link to prestigious sources of alterity which legitimize his right to rule over his people as an "intermediary" between them and the outside world. has written sweeping surveys of the phenomenon of alterity as it applies to kingship and other forms of power, and has also demonstrated the existence of what he refers to as "stranger-king formations" (2010:108) or "dual polities" (ibid.:109), polities where the king traces his descent from a prestigious foreigner or deity, but is also related to his people via a myth of kinship with an indigenous population from whom he derives his legitimacy. In this paper I argue for the usefulness of these concepts in thinking about kingship in the so-called "Neo-Hittite" polities of Anatolia and Syria in the Early Iron Age (c.1200-700 BC), using data derived from archaeological and epigraphic sources. of the universe, must in fact exercise their power through subordinate chiefs and regional lords, who themselves must exercise power through lesser chiefs and lords, and so on, down to the level of village headman. In the Southeast Asian contexts, we sometimes find lesser chiefs paying homage to two or three "masters of the universe" at the same time and playing the apex figures off against each other.

What is the relationship between friendship and human flourishing? This is a central topic in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and one to which Maimonides also returned throughout his career. Despite the relative neglect of this topic in recent scholarship, I argue that friendship (philia) was an important link between moral and intellectual perfection for Maimonides. He identified Aristotle’s virtue friendship with the love between students and teachers and also interpreted many of the divine commandments as efforts to promote both family and virtue friendship among the Jewish people. Friendship was aligned thematically in Maimonides’ writings with topics like kinship and sexuality, circumcision, and the ethics of speech, all of which point in different ways to the unresolved tension between rational and sensual aspects of our human condition. This article therefore contributes to the investigation of the relationship between Maimonides’ legal and philosophical writing on social themes. While Aristotle clearly influenced his reading of biblical and rabbinic texts for example, I will also argue that Maimonides’ religious and communal commitments helped to push his reading of Aristotle in a broadly inclusive direction— both with respect to the range of different goods that are appropriate to an ideal human life as well as the potential accessibility of those goods to different classes of persons. I offer this article as a corrective to the exaggerated focus on seclusion and solitary contemplation that has characterized academic scholarship on Maimonides.

"What are you waiting for?" Stop wasting your time" "You will die alone," "You will miss the train and stay on your own!" These are some of the questions and warnings that single women hear on an everyday basis. Single women are constantly being asked whether they are ''still single,'' or being bid to get married next or soon. Still, soon, ever-after, waste of time, waiting, how long, when, all these form part of the rich language of time.

This book argues that time plays a crucial rule in the discursive formation of female singlehood and that our common understanding of singlehood is dominated by underlying temporal models, premises and concepts. By adopting an interdisciplinary approach and integrating different theoretical realms and perspectives, this book paves way for a new theorization of singlehood and time. Lahad's unique approach gives us the opportunity to explore and theorize singlehood through temporal concepts such as waiting, wasting time, timeout and accelerated aging. Other temporal categories which are examined throughout this book as age, the life course, linearity and commodification of time enable the fresh consideration of our dominant perceptions about collective clocks, schedules, time tables and the temporal organization of social life in general. By proposing this new analytical direction, this book seeks to rework some of our common conceptions of singlehood, and presents a new theoretical arsenal with which the temporal paradigms which devalue and marginalize single women and women's subjectivies in general can be understated. Lahad further argues that singlehood is sociologically important, because it touches upon some of the pressing issues in social life and raises fundamental questions about how people make sense of their lives and organize their lives with others. Drawing on a wide range of cultural resources - including web columns, blogs, advice columns, popular clichés, advertisements and references from television and cinema, the author challenges the meaning-making processes of singlehood and time. In this connection, the book lays the ground for a rich, multilayered politicized analysis of solo living and temporality and intends to be a mile stone in both singlehood and time studies.

Kinneret Lahad is a Senior Lecturer in the NCJW Women and Gender Studies Program of Tel-Aviv University, Israel

Manchester University Press, August 2017 170pp  978-1-5261-1539-3

The book will be available in an Open Access version during September 2017:

Or buy a copy from the MUP website: http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526115393/

A running thread in the arguments of the last chapter was that we need not separate any particular domain of life as the domain of the ethical with a specialized vocabulary or named specific virtues such as the pursuit of the good, or of freedom, or of justice in order to understand what an ethical life entails. I asked, instead of imagining

The classical sociological literature on Amhara hierarchy describes a society based on open relations of domination and an obsession with top-down power. This article asks how these accounts can be reconciled with the strong ethics of love and care that ground daily life in Amhara. We argue that love and care, like power, are understood in broadly asymmetrical terms rather than as egalitarian forms of relationship. As such, they play into wider discourses of hierarchy , but also serve to blur the distinction between legitimate authority and illegitimate power.

Turkey has witnessed a proliferation of Islamic television channels since the liberalization of broadcasting in the 1990s. The programming of these TV channels was initially distinctly theological in character, with shows focusing on the doctrinal, scriptural, and ritualistic aspects of Islam. More recently, however, they have started producing family-friendly entertainment programs as well as shows aimed at “strengthening the family.” Islamic broadcasters intend their family-focused programming as civil initiatives against what they see as the increasing corrosion of the “moral fabric of the family” and devaluation of “family values” in contemporary Turkish society. In these TV shows, audiences are provided with guidance and techniques that would help them cultivate ethical dispositions, knowledge, and skills so that they could assume autonomy and responsibility for administering their families more effectively. Islamic broadcasters explicitly identify their role as assisting the state in  fighting social problems through their programming. Moreover, the discourses and sensibilities promoted on television articulate with the biopolitical concerns of the nation-state and the emerging rationalities of governance. While Islamic television professionals’ self-ascribed mission to “strengthen the family” emerges from a religiously inspired moral imperative to provide service, it simultaneously indicates their internalization of neoliberal rationalities of governance that promote the responsibilization of non-governmental actors for providing social services as well as that of individuals for supporting and caring for their family members. [Keywords: Islam, television, media, family, family values, secularism, neoliberalism, Turkey]

You can download the paper at: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/670934

This essay approaches the persistence of certain forms of conservatism against recent processes of social change in Brazil, related to the increasing visibility of sexual minorities in public sphere. Although many collective controversies concerning this issues emerged along the last years, I wish to adress here a topic somewhat different. I discuss conservative values embedded in conducts and judgments with wich, in everyday life,  people operate without much awareness. I intend to focus, particularly, some representations about the distinction between "homosexuality" and "heterosexuality" which are connected with certain family models and beliefs about the processes of social reproduction. Could the way "heterosexuality" is routinely portrayed articulate forms of subordination of sexual diversity? I would like, through this brief reflection, to highlight some of the challenges that are posed to education professionals committed to building respect for sexual diversity and gender in Brazil.

"Kinship societies cope with conflicts and contradictions either through fission or by displacing them onto the supernatural realm. Though we are barely scratching the surface of an incredibly complex site, the exceptional evidence displayed in this monograph strongly suggests that—at the peak period of collective action—the inhabitants of Valencina de la Concepción were exploring elaborate ritual pathways to mediate these contradictions." Abstract by Pedro Díaz-del-Río

Descrivendo la quotidianità delle relazioni domestiche, questo libro offre uno sguardo sul modo in cui le famiglie adottive trasformano l’iniziale estraneità dei suoi membri in familiarità, intimità, affetti, cura e come fabbricano, nel tempo, le nuove esistenze e le soggettività dei parenti ‘per legge’. La letteratura sull’argomento ha illustrato soprattutto i temi del dislocamento del bambino, dell’alienazione delle famiglie adottive, dei poteri esercitati dai paesi di arrivo sui paesi di origine. Una prospettiva etnografica e narrativa, ancorata alle riflessioni dei Critical Kinship Studies e all’idea di ‘famiglia post-familiare’, restituisce un’appassionante lettura dell’esperienza adottiva dal punto di vista dei genitori, dei figli e di molti altri parenti coinvolti nella ricerca. Pratiche e sentimenti del fare e sentirsi famiglia attraversano così il mondo quotidiano, le relazioni e le storie di vita dei testimoni, situandosi fra la dimensione pubblica dell’essere parenti adottivi e la dimensione più intima e privata.

Kinship terminologies consist of the terms used to reference culturally recognized kinship relations between persons. These
terms have been assumed to identify categories of genealogical relations (despite ethnographic evidence to the contrary), and kinship terminologies are classified using differences in genealogical referents of kin terms. Recent analysis, however, by building on ethnographically validated procedures for computing kin relations from kin terms without reference to genealogy makes evident the underlying generative logic for the structure of kinship terminologies. Making the generative logic of terminologies explicit provides a more rigorous comparative basis for the study of kinship terminology systems.

This article proposes that Quechua forms of social interaction in the region of Cuzco (Peru) emerge through embedded notions of food circulation and cohabitation. The implications of this sociality are that the relations among humans and the places where they live and work are built upon exactly the same notions through which human social relations are constructed. Named places are social individuals and are attributed the thoughts, capacities of action, emotions, and intentions of all social beings. Humans cannot exist except by cultivating social relations with places. This article proposes a framework that focuses on presuppositions prompted by semiotic forms to analyze ontological particularities grounded in face-to-face interactions. [

In 1984, two important facts take place in the anthropological field of Kinship, and in the family representation in art that have a powerful influence from that moment. They change the way in which are reinterpreted family relations and Kinship theories at the anthropology field. At the same time, intimacy and family representation at the visual arts context are immersed in an important process of deconstruction, provocation and renewal.

RESUMEN
En 1984 coinciden dos hechos importantes en la antropología del parentesco y en la representación de la familia en el arte que influyen poderosamente en la manera en la que a partir de ese momento se reinterpretan las relaciones familiares, las teorías del parentesco más arraigadas y, al mismo tiempo, la representación de la intimidad y de la familia en las artes visuales se ve inmersa en un importante proceso de deconstrucción, provocación y renovación.

PhD Thesis, Social Anthropology Department, University of Edinburgh 2017
Passed with no corrections
Supervisors: Dimitri Tsintjilonis and Maya Mayblin (University of Edinburgh)
Examiners: Andreas Bandak (University of Copenhagen) and Magnus Course (University of Edinburgh).

Salas Carreño, Guillermo. 2018. “On Quechua Relatedness to Contemporary and Ancient Dead.” In Non-Humans in Amerindian South America. Ethnographies of Indigenous Cosmologies, Rituals and Songs, edited by Juan Javier Rivera, 197–223. New York; Oxford: Berghahn Books.

La adopción transnacional se inició en el siglo XX a partir de la Gran Guerra que convulsionó a Europa entre 1914 y 1919 y continúa en la actualidad. Su historia está marcada por guerras, enfrentamientos civiles y conflictos internacionales que desestructuraron familias, provocaron crisis alimentarias, limpiezas étnicas y movi- mientos de refugiados.
Sin embargo, también es una historia marcada por la geografía de la desigualdad porque los niños y niñas se mueven desde países y/o familias pobre hacia países y/o familias con recursos por lo que, la adopción transnacional se vincula no sólo a las guerras del siglo XX sino también al colonialismo y a la globalización.
Asimismo, se vincula también a cambios sociales y culturales como la incorpo- ración de la mujer a tareas de producción y no sólo de reproducción, la creación de la infancia como una etapa con características propias y específicas, los cambios re- lacionados con la salud reproductiva como el control de la natalidad y la reproduc- ción asistida.
Así, la adopción transnacional, una de las tecnologías reproductivas más difun- didas en Occidente, se incrementó singularmente hacia el final del siglo XX, al mis- mo tiempo que las técnicas de reproducción asistida, dando origen a formas fami- liares que plantean nuevos interrogantes a la antropología social sobre el parentesco, la persona, la identidad y la pertenencia, la raza y la etnicidad.
A pesar de que la adopción transnacional es relativamente reciente, no sucede lo mismo con la adopción y el acogimiento sobre los que encontramos referencias y regulaciones en diferentes culturas y momentos desde la antigua Babilonia.
En un trabajo seminal Jack Goody (Goody, 1969) señaló que en las sociedades occidentales la adopción tiene tres funciones esenciales:
Proveer de un hogar a huérfanos, expósitos y menores con familias en dificultades. Proveer a parejas infértiles de una descendencia social.
Proveer a una pareja o individuo de un heredero para sus propiedades.
Tan sólo la primera función de estas tres funciones se centra en las necesidades
de los menores, mientras que las dos últimas —esencialmente adultocéntricas—, son las que han orientado las prácticas de adopción hasta la Convención de los Derechos del Niño y de la Niña de 1989, uno de cuyos logros más señalado es haber establecido, aunque probablemente sólo en el espíritu, la intención y la letra, ‘el superior interés del menor’ como ‘consideración primordial’ a atender en todas las medidas que se tomen sobre él (artículo 3.1), es decir, sobre todo ser humano menor de dieciocho años (artículo 1).
La adopción es una práctica por la cual algunos adultos, por diversas razones, crían menores que sin ser sus hijos de nacimiento son considerados miembros ple- nos de su familia. El diccionario de la Real Academia Española de la Lengua define a la adopción como al acto de «Recibir como hijo, con los requisitos y solemnidades que establecen las leyes, al que no lo es naturalmente».
Contrariamente, E. Goody (Goody 1982: 336) señaló que en el acogimiento todo hace referencia a su carácter temporal y, por lo tanto, al hecho de que, a dife- rencia de la adopción, el estatus jurídico, la filiación, del menor no se modifica. También el Diccionario de la Real Academia Española de la Lengua da cuenta de esa temporalidad al definir al acogimiento como «[...] Admitir en su casa o compa- ñía a alguien», «Servir de refugio o albergue a alguien», «Proteger, amparar».

The dominance of classic political history for many years led to the disregarding of “relatives’ letters” as a crucial source for understanding the formation of the Soviet state and society. These were letters to Soviet officials from ordinary people who perceived the state as a family and imagined its leaders as their close relatives. Broadening a dominant concept in recent Soviet studies, that of speaking Bolshevik, I explore “relatives’ letters”, analysing the fact that their authors were speaking kinship as evidence that reveals the premodern foundations of modern states and uncovers a social practice for generating power in everyday routines. Freed from the constraints of Weberian-modernisationist and Burkhardtian paradigms, I reflect on the ways that seemingly opposed ideas about tradition and modernity, power and kinship, status and marginality, the licit and the illicit infused representations of “Soviet citizenship” and analyse how letter writers justified their connections with the abstract concept of “the state”. “Relatives’ letters” show that the state lived in and through its subjects: Imagining a state as a political family and leaders as close relatives provided a source of identity and contributed to social cohesion in the Soviet empire but also explains the very nature of contemporary informal relationships. Consequently, speaking kinship became a universal political language of governance and the language of ordinary people’s emotional attachment to the paternalistic state.

This paper examines continuity and change in Lakota belief and ritual, focusing on the social organization of contemporary Lakota ceremonial life. For many Lakotas of Pine Ridge Reservation ritual structures life. The contemporary religious landscape consists of a number of ritual groups, which I call ritual thiyóšpayes, after the Lakota word for band or lodge group, the extended family and historical basic unit of kinship. At the center of these groups is a religious practitioner, a symbol of group identity and solidarity. Ritual thiyóšpayes consist of core and sub-core member families that regularly attend rituals and other corporately sponsored social events. The cohesion of a ritual thiyóšpaye is based largely on equality, mutual help, participation, and one-mindedness. The relationship between a practitioner and his ritual thiyóšpaye is dynamic, characterized by reciprocity, mutual influence, and exchange: the practitioner shapes the beliefs, worldview, and identity of his followers, symbolizing the group to both members and nonmem-bers, while simultaneously being shaped by his followers as a representative of their social, psychological, and religious needs, beliefs, and values. Although patterns of social interaction have changed since the dawn of the reservation period, there remains a distinct and undeniable continuity with past traditions. Ontological approaches in anthropology have been hotly debated in recent years (Posthumus 2017). Some unifying themes in this diverse body of research involve the exploration of the composition and character of alter worlds and the assumption that different peoples inhabit different, oftentimes conflicting realities (see Descola 2013; Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell 2007; Posthumus 2018; Viveiros de Castro 1998). While there are many trends and foci in anthropology's ontological turn, not all suffer from the methodological problems noted in a number of critical assessments. According to Michael L. Cepek, some recent anthropological investigations of ontology "focus on the bare content of abstract propositions while paying little attention to their pragmatic function, epistemological stance, affective tone, and position in a division of linguistic and conceptual labor" (Cepek 2016, 624). While this may be true of some inflections of ontologically minded anthropology, other studies pay careful attention to history and context, producing accurate ethnographies that are also theoretically engaging. For instance , neither Cepek (2016) nor Graeber (2015) mention the work of Philippe Descola (2013) in their critiques of ontological anthropology. I questioned Graeber about this omission via email, and his response was that he does not think Descola is really entirely an ontologically inclined anthropologist, per se, but rather he is a structuralist describing models that are never purely instantiated as such. In this article, I explore the role of ceremony in the social organization of contemporary Lakota (Western [Teton] Sioux) culture. Although I firmly believe in the importance of describing to the best of our abilities the worldviews of people different from ourselves and seriously engaging with alter belief systems, my attention to religion in this article does not take on the baggage of cosmological concerns. Rather, it demonstrates how ceremonial life or religious belief and ritual is interconnected with other aspects of life, in this case kinship and social organization, and how carefully contextualizing studies of alter worlds in their cultural, historical, and sociopolitical frameworks can hopefully remedy the meth-odological problems plaguing some of the studies in the so-called ontological turn.

This article builds on sociological accounts of the negotiated, creative character of kinship and on previous studies of children's involvement in family life to ask how children actively create and define kinship and relatedness. Drawing on data from a qualitative study with children aged 7—12 in the north of England, the authors identify five interconnected ways in which children made sense of kinship. They explore how children understood genealogical kinship conventions, creatively deployed or interpreted kin terms, and defined some unrelated others as `like family'. The interplay between children's creative agency and adults' involvement in children's kinship is considered.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0907568208097201

In tribute to the foundational, yet productively contentious, nature of the ethnographic imagination in anthropology, this series honors the creator of the term "ethnographic theory" himself. Monographs included in this series represent unique contributions to anthropology and showcase groundbreaking work that contributes to the emergence of new ethnographically-inspired theories or challenge the way the "ethnographic" is conceived today.

This study strives to show the culturally reflexive properties of mythological narratives by describing the dynamism stemming from the simultaneous inclusion of various types of temporality and specific usage of space. The basic premise is that any symbolic system/culture contains antithetical principles which are nevertheless upheld simultaneously (in case of ancient Egypt exemplified by the " positional succession " phenomenon). These cultural paradoxes are both a source of discomfort to the system (as they show its incongruence and thus contingency), but also a source of alternative symbolical layout and thus of great power (because they transcend the given social structures). Certain phenomena, myth being one of them, enable to both cope with these paradoxes and utilise their transformative potential. To exemplify how exactly such a process occurs, I provide an analysis of the papyrus d'Orbiney, also known as the Tale of Two Brothers, subsequently identifying it as a " ring-composition ". Consequences of such an identification in relation to the reflexive quality of mythological narratives are then discussed.

This paper addresses typological relationships among kinship terminologies determined from structural differences in the way kin terms are organized as systems of concepts.  Viewing a terminology as a system of concepts makes evident the generative logic of a terminology that starts with properties shared across several terminologies and eventually includes properties specific to a single terminology.  These structural properties lead to a typology in which structural differences between terminologies form the branch points.  The typology highlights two primary dimensions along which terminologies may be distinguished: (1) structural differences between terminologies and (2) variation in the morphology of the lexemic form of kin terms.  Variation in the former relates to change constrained in the cultural domain and change in the latter relates to change constrained in the linguistic domain.

Nelle configurazioni familiari della società contemporanea si avverte chiaramente il venir meno di alcune delle certezze normative socialmente riconosciute e ordinate che fino ad un recente passato hanno orientato i comportamenti dei singoli. Le modalità di formazione della coppia, le forme riproduttive, le pratiche residenziali si definiscono oggi in primo luogo a partire dalle scelte operate principalmente da individui animati dalla volontà di realizzare un proprio percorso di autorealizzazione soggettiva.
Da questo punto di vista la famiglia nucleare è apparsa storicamente come la forma che meglio risponde alle esigenze di autonomia e di indipendenza del soggetto rispetto alle appartenenze ascritte. Ma proprio la famiglia nucleare ci appare oggi attraversata da spinte e tensioni che ne hanno ridefinito profondamente forme, tempi e funzioni. Nella realtà del vissuto familiare si coglie infatti un allontanamento progressivo dal modello nucleare- coniugale, basato sulla coppia coniugale eterosesssuale, con figli, espressione della sintesi fra il piano biologico, quello sociale e quello giuridico, fino a dar vita in molti casi ad una divaricazione vera e propria fra la famiglia fondata "sul sangue e sulla legge" e quella sociale sostenuta dalle scelte personali e dagli affetti.
Se i processi di formazione della famiglia si strutturano intorno alla scelta individuale, le relazioni così costruite sono caratterizzate dalla variabilità e dalla reversibilità. L'imprevedibilità diviene allora la cifra distintiva dei modi di stare in relazione nella famiglia e nella parentela. Come emerge dai saggi contenuti in questo volume e da altre ricerche condotte di recente nel contesto italiano, le forme familiari risentono direttamente di questo mutato posizionamento del soggetto nei confronti tanto della propria appartenenza d'origine come nei confronti dei soggetti con i quali condivide la propria scelta di famiglia. Gli autori dei saggi contenuti nel volume hanno accolto la sfida di cimentarsi, attraverso la pratica etnografica, con alcune delle questioni e dei temi di ricerca sopra accennati. In particolare si concentrano su alcuni tratti specifici che caratterizzano i nuovi modi di fare famiglia in Italia, risultato di scelte informali, di ricomposizioni ma anche della lungoresidenza dei figli nelle case dei genitori.

Kinship involves social interactions and forms of social organization based on systems of culturally constructed social relations expressed linguistically through the kin terms constituting a kinship terminology. The organization and structure for these social relations expressed in a kinship terminology is formally modeled here as being part of an axiomatic theory in which a few, primary kinship concepts are the equivalent of axioms in a mathematical theory. The cultural knowledge embedded in a kinship terminology therefore is part of a cultural theory – analogous to a mathematical theory – that expresses the culturally salient kinship properties derived from the primary kinship concepts.

This chapter provides two answers to the question: "What do households do?" First, their members participate in craft activities and second, the social composition of these craft households evolves and changes through time.  One type of craft activity that households practice is pottery making, but what happens to potters' households through time? How do they change? To answer these questions, I trace the changes in the composition and location of potters' households in Ticul, Yucatán, Mexico, between 1965 and 1997. By describing these changes, I hope to provide some insight into the processes that affect the organization of potters' households through time, and how those processes might be applicable to the study of ancient households.

(This is a distillation and early version of pp. 31-91 in the author's "Social Change and the Evolution of Pottery Production and Distribution in a Maya Community" 2008, University Press of Colorado. See detail in "Books" above. Furthermore, a narrative account of these changes by type of production unit (Brumfiel and Earl's typology) and changes in extended family of potters through time along with changes in physical layout, and why is provided in another book: The Evolution of Ceramic Production Organization in a Maya Community (University Press of Colorado, 2015).

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This article explores the relationship between queer thought and kinship through a study of video autoethnographies by Jean Carlomusto and Richard Fung. I propose the concept of ambivalence as a useful point of departure for grappling with the conflicted political, affective, and conceptual terrain of LGBT kinship. Through close textual analysis of four video autoethnographies, I extend existing sociological, anthropological, and philosophical scholarship on LGBT family and kinship to consider audiovisual production as a specific and productive kinship practice. Queer film and video autoethnography offers unexpected and insightful accounts of queer relationality. In contrast with dominant North American family narratives and imagery concerned with continuity, heredity, and the closed white, heteronormative North American intimate sphere, Carlomusto's and Fung's works probe the moments where kinship breaks down: illness and death, migrant experience, and family secrets. Through a doubled formal and thematic emphasis on fragmentation, discontinuity, and affective ambivalence, these extraordinary works help us understand kinship otherwise, or queerly.

Several hundred inscribed bronze objects dating from Western and
Eastern Zhou periods were commissioned for or by married
women. Several dozen inscriptions are known whose commissioners
called themselves sheng 生(甥) of a number of lineages. In pre-Qin
Chinese, the term sheng 甥designated several categories of affinal
relatives: paternal aunts’ sons, maternal uncles’ sons, wives’ brothers,
sisters’ husbands, and sons of sisters or daughters. The wide geographical
and chronological spread of female- or sheng-related
vessels, as well as dedications to “many affinal relatives” (hungou
婚購) in bronze inscriptions point to the importance of marital ties
in early Chinese society and politics.
Focusing on the inscriptions commissioned by sheng, the present
article suggests that even when concluded at a considerable distance,
marriages produced long-term mutual obligations for male members
of the participating lineages or principalities. Affinal relationships
represented social and political capital that could be converted in
terms of individuals’ careers and prestige or benefits for their whole
lineages/states. In sum, starting from the early Western Zhou
period, marital alliances represented a substantial integrative factor
in early Chinese politics. On the one hand, marital alliances helped
to consolidate the radial network of Zhou states centered on the
Zhou king. On the other hand, they facilitated the construction of
decentralized regional and interregional inter-state networks. The
latter guaranteed the stability of the Zhou political system even when it had a weak center. As a result, the Zhou networks did not fall
apart following crises in the Zhou royal house, but continued to
expand by the inclusion of new members.

This essay examines the social position of women and the implications of gender
representations among indigenous peoples in post-World War II Portuguese
Timor. It is a bibliographic critique based on works of academic anthropology
and of certain missionary and colonial administrative ethnographies published
between the 1950s and 1980s. I argue that in general women occupied a
relatively subaltern position in the collective dynamics of social reproduction.
This results from the specificity of local social structures and from the separation
of sex and gender. I attempt to elucidate an apparent contradiction: on the one
hand, femaleness, as a gender classifying principle, is associated with superiority
among many peoples in Timor-Leste and, on the other hand, women are often
in subaltern positions regarding collective reproduction. I argue that the ways the
female principle and the idea of fertility are ritually handled serve the purpose of
producing and reproducing male dominance in the dynamics of collective social
reproduction and the co-opting of women’s power of giving life.

The article is set against India's pronatalist ethos and fertility industry that fetishize biological motherhood as natural and real. To counter its bio-centric paradigm of mother-making, it forefronts and juxtaposes the adoptive (non-birth-but-legal) mother with the surrogate (birth-giver-but-legal non-mother) to mirror the flux and constructedness of 'real' motherhood. I use a poststructuralist frame to examine their non-normative ‘choice’ and complex agentic struggles. Seeking legitimacy as ethical maternal subjects, they both reimagine and/or reify the normative maternal. I also focus on their absent antithetical counterparts – the birth and commissioning mother – to highlight how socio-legal structures and logic either fail to recognize or attempt to hide non-patriarchal motherhood. Since this constellation of ‘mothers’ points to the discursivity of the maternal, I argue that the non-corporeal formative elements of motherhood be emphasized. I urge a shift from the feminist preoccupation with choice towards intersectional structural realities that trigger/limit agency and, ultimately, human relatedness.

It is generally agreed that rates of marriage are declining in Southern Africa. It is also clear that for people who are wealthy enough to marry, the long-standing constitution of marriage as process is increasingly replaced by a making of marriage as event. What I wish to add to both of these broad assessments is something that this focus on the decline of marriage might risk overlooking, which is the proliferation of partial or unfinished but nonetheless deeply consequential unions: bonds of affinity that, in rural northern KwaZulu-Natal, as in many other parts of Southern Africa, are set in motion by histories of material prestation, including but not limited to marriage payments as such. Engaging with recent theoretical work by Michael Lambek, I explore this social consequentiality of marriage payments — finished or not — by focusing on the efficacy and the afterlives of the act of prestation itself. I suggest that these transactions constitute sensuous figurations of both kinship and affinity, in a process that draws its effects from the recognition of an act by a sensing audience, including, very importantly, the audience of the dead. This produces enchainments of marriage payments in social processes that outlive their performance, whether they are part of a concluded bond or not.

The Sa'dan Toraja of upland Sulawesi, Indonesia have long been celebrated in the anthropological literature for their elaborate procession-filled mortuary rituals, which draw vast networks of kith and kin to mourn, memorialise, and reaffirm familial bonds and obligations. Whether residing in the homeland or abroad, most Torajans underscore funeral rites as the most vital expression of Toraja familial and cultural identity. Although some estimates suggest that more Torajans now reside off-island and overseas than remain in the homeland, extended familial funerals in the homeland continue to have a centripetal physical, economic and emotional pull. While various scholars have documented the ways in which remittances from Toraja migrants or the presence of international tourists have transformed Toraja funerals in recent decades, this article focusses on the role of social media in navigating global familial relationships and rituals. Indonesia has the largest number of Facebook subscribers in the world, and this study offers the first exploration of the ways in which Facebook interweaves farflung familial relationships. This study also examines house-society orientations in the Toraja highlands and addresses the use of Facebook by Torajans in the homeland to cultivate continued allegiances to ancestral houses (around which extended Toraja families are oriented). Finally, this article also examines a large-scale 2012 Toraja funeral in order to spotlight the contours of the Toraja family in the current era of neoliberalism and cyber-technologies. The article offers insights into the ways in which various Torajans navigate social media and non-local corporations to image, reimagine and negotiate familial identities for various audiences (local, national and transnational).

The volume "New Directions in Spiritual Kinship: Sacred Ties Across the Abrahamic Religions," edited by Todne Thomas, Asiya Malik and Rose Wellman, undertakes a comparative analysis of "spiritual kinship" (such as God-parenthood) in Christianity, Judaism and Islam. My chapter, "Kinship as Ethical Relation," starts by questioning the usefulness of spiritual kinship as a category for the understanding of Judaism and expands that critique into an alternate model that might be more useful for comparative purposes. I argue that the idea of "Spiritual Kinship" emerges precisely from an a set of Christian taxonomies that are often implicitly or explicitly anti-Jewish (kinship of the flesh vs. kinship of the spirit, the letter and the spirit of the law, etc.) which makes it unsuitable as an "Abrahamic" category. Moreover, the specific ways in which it is unsuitable for comparative purposes actually demonstrate the importance of this category for understanding of Christianity and of the anthropological kinship categories (affinal, consanguineal and fictive)  that were in large measure adapted from European Christian sources. Viewing kinship as a set of ethical relations, by contrast, does indeed allow for useful comparison across these religious divides and makes better sense of the ethnographic and textual data. Examples are brought from both modern and medieval Jewish life.